The Embalmer is Matteo Garrone’s fable on love, desire, loneliness and despair. An achingly sad film about a love-triangle that culminates in tragedy. Peppino is a taxi-dermist who falls for Valerio ( Valerio Foglia Manzillo) from the moment their paths cross at the zoo. Peppino offers him a job as his assistant, with a considerable pay increase, and soon Valerio becomes his protege‘. Car trouble introduces the third principal, Deborah (Elisabetta Rocchetti) a receptionist for an auto mechanic. As she begins to take Valerio away from Peppino, the friction escalates. An awful feeling starts in the pit of your stomach that something terrible is going to happen, something ghastly and unavoidable. And, of course it does.
Peppino (Ernesto Mahieux) is skilled, cunning, intelligent and charismatic. He is also diminutive. He is not an actual dwarf, but in comparison to the tall, attractive Valerio, he seems small and clownish. Just like the dwarfs in Carson McCuller’s The Ballad of Sad Cafe and Edgar Allen Poe’s Hop-Frog, he has learned to ingratiate himself to people. This is what “freaks” must do to get by in society. And The Embalmer begs the issue: does Garrone consider Peppino a freak because he is a dwarf or because he is gay? Or is he the victim of a world that deals in such cruel, dumb, broad strokes? In this sense it becomes difficult to say whether Garrone likes Peppino or believes he gets what he deserves.
It is not enough that Peppino is too short and older and forced to play the buffoon just to avoid derision. He is also manipulative, calculating, underhanded and dishonest. He has learned to exploit a culture that trades in appearances. It is never suggested that he could get what he needs by leveling with Valerio, that he could succeed on the strength of his considerable personal charm. It’s never suggested he could get his sexual needs met by escorts, or that maybe he doesn’t need to get the object of his affection drunk, or trick him when sharing the same bed. This is pathetic behavior, and The Embalmer suggests that Peppino’s only realistic choices are dodgy.
And yet we can identify with Peppino’s predicament. When you are attracted someone who is godlike then anyone can feel inadequate or downright ugly. And how many men engaged in loving attachments (platonic and otherwise) have been sent packing because of an insecure girlfriend? Deborah is every bit as conniving as Peppino, and perfectly happy to steal whatever she feels is her due. In a confrontation with Valerio she asks him if he doesn’t make himself sick. His relationship is “depraved” because Peppino’s attractions make him criminal by cultural definition.
The appearance of Deborah sets calamity in motion because she forces Valerio to examine the nature of his connection to Peppino. Valerio drifts, Peppino gets more and more possessive, more enraged, and the camera looms closer to his face. Gradually, he looks more sinister. We see his warped, misshapen teeth, his desperate mugging and forced joviality. Does being gay mean we must get what little we can by chicanery? In a film that pivots on arguably false dichotomies The Embalmer creates a world where Valerio must choose between wife, child, “family” and a life of dissolution and ambition with mentor, Peppino. The bimbo or the dwarf. In some cultures this may be the practical reality, but the structure, the presumptions have to make us wonder about Garrone’s intentions.
Even when Valerio chooses Peppinio, it is not enough. It is unclear whether they have ever consummated, but there is no doubt the virile, gorgeous, Valerio is devoted to his mentor. In the end he is so overcome with self-loathing that Valerio’s love cannot penetrate. Despite the fact that everything he’s done for Valerio had a price tag, that he vacillates between genuine care and exploitation, Peppino ultimately comes off as sympathetic. Perhaps because Valerio can read between the lines and see Peppino’s strong points, his intelligence and wit and joie de vivre.
Perhaps because gay men are often punished in life for taking the high road. How many gay men, overcome by the magnificence of male beauty, have put themselves in harm’s way, by acting on their true feelings? Maybe this makes Peppino’s subterfuge understandable if not excusable. He suffers an chilling, ignominious burial (if you can call it that) that is all the more wrenching for its’ secrecy.
Director of Photography Marco Onorato suffuses The Embalmer with images of destitution, emptiness, barrenness, bleak, dismal washed-out colors, blurriness and fog, blackened venues with jagged eruptions of minimal lighting. He manages a curiously successful combination that would seem inspired by El Greco and Monet.